The first person to walk on the Moon died on 25 August following complications after cardiac surgery. Tributes and condolences have been sent by people around the world in an outpouring of gesture reminiscent of the collective emotion that touched everyone, everywhere on the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon on 21 July 1969.

For half the world’s population today who were not alive when that historic mission took place, it is a time for them to reflect on what was accomplished more than 43 years ago. For those who were alive then it is a time to recall those historic moments, flashed around the world as the first international gathering of a global audience to watch a monumental event taking place on another world. For those who were closer to the core of those activities, it is a very special sadness for having lost a member of the team, a part of a close family that now mourns one less in its ranks.

Spaceflight will carry a special biographical tribute to Neil Armstrong in the next issue out early September and on behalf of the entire membership the President of the British Interplanetary Society has sent its condolences to the US Ambassador in the UK and to the Administrator of NASA.

Apollo showed the immense powerful impact spaceflight had on people, just by doing it. The action had an immense reaction.
Armstrong did not take that step alone , many felt that they took it with him and altered forever the way human beings perceive themselves, their surroundings, priorities and their true place in the scheme of things.

In fact, one effect was that spaceflight was then seen as a wrong priority, and the solution to all humanity’s ill’s was to take money from space and put it into …………. ….(insert problem) and hey presto it is solved in a few years.
The nerdy engineering activity that was having such an effect was seen as a hindrance to solving so many other problems and not as a positive influence in encouraging solutions. There was a lack of thinking through, in how such issues existed, and how they could be properly resolved. Such problems existed, in spite of spaceflight and not because of it.